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Monday, November 02, 2009

Innovation in Computer Science

As the polylogblogdogslogglog blog points out, the ICS results are out. 39 papers were accepted in all - at some point I knew the number of submissions, but I've forgotten since.

The ICS folks didn't make life easy for themselves by explicitly stating that they wanted "conceptual contributions". But looking over the list of papers, a few things come to mind:

It's a great list of papers. Nothing to complain about really, and any of these could have been a credible paper at FOCS/STOC

The Arora et al paper on designing derivatives using NP-hard problems has already received so much chatter, one might argue that the conference mandate has already been satisfied. Similarly for the quantum money followup.

Even if the whole 'conceptual contributions' thing doesn't pan out, I see no harm in having a third conference inserted between FOCS and STOC - the more the merrier.

I guess innovation = "game theory + crypto + quantum + misc" :)

A side note. 8 of the 12 PC members have papers at the conference. This is a departure from the theory "norm". While I don't necessarily think it's a problem (everyone except theoryCS does this, and this is also a new conference), it's worth discussing. Is this something we'd like to have happen in other theory conferences as well ? Recall that the first year of the SODA 2-page experiment also had PC-submitted papers (and that was mainly to ensure submission volume, from what I recall).